The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman

By Philip Boobbyer

Publication Year: 2013

The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman is an in-depth look at the life, influence, and ideology of one of the most original figures in twentieth century religion. Frank Buchman (1878–1961), the man behind the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament movements, had foundations as a Lutheran pastor, evangelist, and active member of the American Student Christian Movement. His beliefs evolved as a response to the emergence of global society leading him to develop a world philosophy that could speak to different religions and cultural traditions. His contributions to conflict resolution between nations and his promotion of inter-faith dialogue solidified his influence. While his teachings elicited support across faiths, there were also many who doubted its place in Christian tradition, and he was often accused of being pro-communist, anti-imperial, and a Nazi sympathizer. Philip Boobbyer’s book is the first scholarly treatment of Buchman’s work, theology, and ideology, and an addition to a growing corpus of scholarly literature on the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament movements. Boobbyer shows how Buchman’s life reflects broader processes in twentieth century religion and politics and how his work exemplifies the ways in which religious thinkers and groups sought to make themselves relevant to the ideological conflicts of modernity without sacrificing their core beliefs.

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

I have long been interested in Frank Buchman and the movement he founded,
known successively as the Oxford Group, Moral Re-Armament,
and more recently
Initiatives of Change. The reasons for this are partly academic. Buchman’s
outreach into ecclesiastical, political, and industrial circles was remarkable, ...

Introduction

“The world is slow to realise that the spiritual is more powerful than the material,”
declared the American religious leader Frank Buchman in November
1938. He was talking on the BBC, with the growing polarization of Europe on
his mind, and wanted to alert his listeners to the power of what he called “valid
religious experience” to generate personal and social change. ...

1. Origins

Frank Nathaniel Daniel Buchman was born on June 30, 1878, in Pennsburg,
Pennsylvania, to a Pennsylvania Dutch family that had roots in eastern Switzerland.
His father, Franklin, owned a general store on Main Street, Pennsburg,
before buying a small hotel by the railway, the Buchman House Hotel. ...

2. Guidance

Henry Wright frequently compared prayer to a “triangle,” involving God, the
Christian worker, and the person being prayed for, and Buchman often used
this analogy during his missionary journeys in Asia.1 The idea seems partly to
have been that instead of people praying that God would help their neighbors,
they should pray that God would use them to help their neighbors.2 ...

3. Personal Work

Buchman was always enthusiastic about the subject of “personal work,” or “life-changing,”
as he sometimes called it. It was here that the fourth of the absolute
standards, love, came into focus for him. Personal work was meant to be the
outcome of a real love for people, he believed. ...

4. Theological Questions

As Buchman’s approach to personal work indicated, he was eager to avoid approaching
people with preconceived ideas. F. B. Meyer once said that Christianity
was “not a creed, but a life.”1 Buchman’s view was similar. He saw his
work in terms of “the propagation of life, rather than the propagation of a
plan.”2 ...

5. Strategy and Organization

In OG and MRA spirituality, the quiet time was partly intended to provide a
reflective space in which people could try to look at the needs of others and the
world from the Holy Spirit’s perspective. It was thought that the Holy Spirit had
a strategy or plan for humankind that people could try to cooperate with. ...

6. Politics and Ideology

If MRA was intended to be vehicle for changing the world, it was also an idea—
although there was sometimes a confusion of the two concepts in MRA publicity.1 It grew out of a desire on Buchman’s part to articulate a vision for the world.
This had been present in his mind at least from the mid-1930s
onward. ...

Conclusion

While Buchman was very adaptable, there was a core set of insights that informed
his vision and that actually changed little. Writing in the late 1950s,
one of his supporters, Basil Yates, suggested that the underlying architecture
of his thought consisted of three elements: the moral underpinnings of faith,
obedience to the Holy Spirit, ...

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